Kasurian Atlas (Furcadia map project)

[brilokuloj]

Just making a thread for this so I can bump it later.

Some stuff I'm hoping to tackle next:

• Jujinka & Summer festival
  
• Free dreams offered in the Patch Archives
  
• Some more maps from Furcish Download Heaven
  

Speaking of, I was thinking it might be nice to cover the whole contents of the Patch Archive, but I don't know necessarily how relevant that would be... there's some really wild stuff in there, though...

[brilokuloj]

I've reformatted the official maps section (it looks worse right now, but in the long run it will look better) and added the seasonal maps I do have. I thought I had Jujinka's but I do not :(

I also made a section for maps of misc source.

My personal highlight: "Meovanni turned into hell"

[brilokuloj]

I made a links section. For the past week I have gone through dozens, literally nearly a hundred links looking for more. I think I might have exhausted everything that can be trivially found without connections.

So towards the end I started going a little crazy looking for any more leads. On Songhigh Knoll I found evidence of a "message maker" and even found a picture of it in the Furcadia archives. It looks like one part Animal Crossing mail, one part that sticker drawing game every edutainment game has. I wanted any information on this and the frustration got so bad that I actually got the 1997 Furcadia archive.org client connecting to a local server.

... and that's as far as it went. I couldn't figure out how to get the client to let me initiate the mysterious Message Maker. I'm not even convinced that it's accessible through the version I have, though text strings related to it still exist in the EXE.

Finally, to get some closure, I downloaded the new Furcadia and played with its map editor for 5 seconds. I did not play the game itself. The new map editor is fine I guess.

I dumped all the stickers that the Message Maker comes with into bmp files, but there's like 400 of them and it's going to be a pain. And I guess I still need to tackle the maps available on the official Patch Archive, but I have no idea if that will make me feel better or worse.

MORAL OF THE STORY: NURSE... is a MAN! with a 'HOOK'

[brilokuloj]

I went as far as to join a Discord server and DM someone asking for help finding the old Furcadian festival maps. It was a Herculean effort on my part and it went nowhere because they didn't have them. To be honest, I entered a period of darkness for a day or two, because I was starting to feel like I was crazy for caring this much about things even the archivists haven't bothered archiving.

Then I went back to my bullshit.

I've updated the links section with every webpage I found of particular note. That's 130 pages! I found a lot of people's personal websites that I didn't include as they weren't very Furcadia-relevant and often they were just one page saying "coming soon". But there's so so so many pages here with people's character backstories, their guilds, old screenshots, fond memories.

And wouldn't you know it, I did find 7 more maps:

• Island Dream
• Cathedral Dream 
• Courthouse Dream 
• Cloud Home 
• Magic Lamp
• Island Retreat

Here's some ideas I've had rattling around:

• Most of the links are probably not interesting to anyone but me. I would like to add descriptions, also dates.
• Most of the commonly-reappearing maps would get chartered as a "guild" in order to claim a spot in one of the hubworlds. All guilds were posted on the Furcadia website with their coordinates. I could make an interactive map that displays guilds where they were located with a link to their archived website.
• I collected a lot of old screenshots. A screenshots page might be in order.
• I'd like to archive all of the free graphic patches that have been distributed, but that is going to be a considerable undertaking.
• I have found a lot of people's midi collections as well. This I was considering making into a WOW project, basically I dump them all where people can listen to them and write them down in a spreadsheet or something. Could be its own section on the site.

[huckleton]

I would be so excited for the MIDI collection.

A possibly-silly question I've been wondering about the maps: Can one actually go in and explore them as Furcadia maps? Like, are they actually stored as PNGs in the game? You never know when games like Spore exist

[brilokuloj]

I would be so excited for the MIDI collection.

A possibly-silly question I've been wondering about the maps: Can one actually go in and explore them as Furcadia maps? Like, are they actually stored as PNGs in the game? You never know when games like Spore exist

Great question! No, the PNGs are just exports from the map editor. By default they're .MAP files, a format made for Furcadia which is pretty trivially readable with a hex editor.

It wouldn't be hard at all to fit the map data inside of the PNGs, if there was a good reason to do so. My PNG export of LEV01.MAP (the original Meovanni) is a staggering 7.7 MB, which is more than the map (31.8 kB) and its script file (4.8 kB) combined. Since we're working with an uncompressed tile-based map system, the largest a map file gets is 291.5 kB. One of the largest script files I have in my collection is a Tetris recreation at 536.7 kB.

So frankly, the PNG exports are embarrassingly oversized for what they are. If I can't come up with a compression solution I might have to do some sort of dynamic loading setup. I've even fantasized about building a Javascript viewer for the raw map files but that's getting into my flights of fancy.